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Originally Posted by mlangsdorf
My off-the-cuff suggestion for chip fabs is to treat them as multiple assembly lines: AMD spends $2B in the late 90s to build Fab 30, and Fab 30 is roughly 600,000 assembly lines for $200 chips running in parallel and can produce 8 million chips every 3 months, which is pretty close to what I remember as the standard output of Fab 30 without requiring extra shifts. And 600,000 assembly lines for $200 chips cost $2.4B, so the numbers work out pretty well.
If you treat chip fabs as multiple parallel assembly lines, you could also say that each worker is working multiple lines at once. A single silicon wafer gets etched with 400+ chips, so if that 40 hours of work produces 400 chips, you can pay him up to $1000/hour and still have 50% of the chip price available for materials, overhead, and paying fixed costs. Of course, fab techs make a lot less than $1000/hour, even in aggregate, but microprocessor chip costs are dominated by the fixed costs of the fabs anyway.
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Thanks!
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In the end, though, I suspect high-tech production rules are going to be a mass of special cases that are going to be based on specialist knowledge for each industry. One for instance would be microprocessor chips: while I can believe that it takes ~40 hours of labor to make a wafer, that labor is done in 15-30 minute chunks over 8-16 weeks. I don't know how you account for that in the rules or even if its necessary to do so.
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I would not be surprised of microprocessors were an unusually unusual case. Lots of things can be made by casting, milling, stamping, etc. whereas microprocessors use photolithography.
Besides, the point is not 100% realism, just something gameable. Something detailed enough for games about revolutionaries who need to equip a whole army with untraceable guns, space colonists, or post-apocalyptic entrepreneurs. You might go for having one quick-and-dirty rule per major category of gear—Generic Chip Fab, Generic Gun Factory, Generic Car Factory, etc.